Martin Emuté
by caudelac
Summary: Fight Club/Les Mis crossover. What an interesting relationship Javert and Enjolras have. pg-13 for language, and some violence.
1. five minutes.

I.

People are always asking me if I knew about Martin Enjolras.

Of course I knew about him. It is part of my profession to know everything about everyone. Or was. I cannot say much about what I do for a living right now.

With a gun between your teeth you speak only in vowels.

We're on the top floor of a wine shop in the rue de la chanvrerrie, name: "Corinth" founded by M. Hucheloup whenever. His wife, Mme. Hucheloup is the proprietress. It was closed on 6 Juin, 1832; at nine thirty-two am. in a very short time, we're going to be dead.

The wine shop is closed because the Progerssive Destruction comittee of Project ABC, (or, _Abassé_) have barricaded the Rue de Chanvrerrie, and the Rue de la Montedour. Similar barricades constructed by other members of this selfsame committe have been erected at St Mery, Aubry le-Boucher, and other key places with the aim of the overthrow and destruction of- not reform mind you; destruction- of the French government. The idea is that a regime that has enforced itself violently must be removed with violence. I know this, because Enjolras knows this.

It is representative of that violence, both the enforcement and the revolution, that Enjolras is holding the barrel of his shotgun between my teeth. Enjolras says that this isn't a real death. Like in the Tarot deck. Death is the first step to eternal life. Anarchy is the first step to human evolution. "We're not martyrs," he says, "We're sacrificial wolves."

He says, "Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you and you will be born again with me."

What I do for a living, why the oily barrel of Enjolras' shotgun is printing a cylyndrical dent into the back of my throat, is I am a police officer.

I am a Police officer. Enjolras is an Revolutionary. I am order. He is Anarchy.

You do the math.

Which isn't to say it wasn't beautiful, for a while. But I am getting ahead of us. In ten minutes, five units of national gaurdsmen will swarm all over this barricade. eight units will fall upon st mery, seven at Fauborg st. Antoine, at Notre Dame. At this time; between five and ten barrels of black powder, per barricade, will be detonated by memebers of the arson committe of project ABC. In nine minutes, all that will be left of this monument to anarchy, of more than half of the army, and of myself and Enjolras, will be smouldering rubble. The palace will be ashes and marble, ashes and silk, ashes and gold and splinters of wood.

La Force will be gone.

The concierge will be gone.

I know this, because Enjolras knows this. Or maybe it's the other way around.

More likely, it doesn't matter. I'm a traitor, but Enjolras will be a legend.

Somewhere, from outside, we can hear the breaking of wine bottles on the pavement, over the barricade. And for a moment I realise that all of this- the barricade, the gun, the revolution- have something to do with a man named Jean Valjean.

Seven minutes.

Enjolras grits his teeth, you can see the veins sticking out of his neck, hard white wires carved out of marble. There are things he knows, things I know, things that the both of us know. Why he is doing what he is doing-- why he is holding a gun between my lips and why I am sitting here, having fallen for it-- the details of why form out of the fog of the past several months before me. If I aim to be honest-- and with myself, there is little enough reason not to be, now-- how _we_ got here... That I know.

I know everything. For the last forty years, it's been my fucking job to know fucking everything.

five minutes.

* * *

Yep. there are liberal borrowings both from Fight Club and Les Mis herein. *crosses fingers. she doesn't make any $ on this anyway.*


	2. five minutes of repose.

II. 

I'm sitting in the sweating darkness of a tavern; surrounded by men and boys of various ages complaining about the government. Grantaire's breath, ten times more humid than the summer air and reeking of brandy is hot on my neck, muttering in between scoffs at their complaints and his own complaining about his existance. I listen to him and the others with one eye closed, trying to lose myself in their talk- revolution. Death to polignac. Constitution of the year two. Sufferage. Worker's rights. Napoleon is a scarecrow; Lafayette is a pumpkin, Louis-Phillipe is a pear. Rent is up, food is up, work is down. Prostitutes are people too. 

Oh yes. 

The name of the tavern is the Musain. It's my monday and friday night retreat. I do it to kill the time. 

Time is my enemy. 

I listen in the darkness of my corner to seditious lines from youthful mouths; and to the hapless drunkard behind me; I sit and listen for hours collecting guilty little secrets until I think I will explode. I eat them up with a loaf of crusty bread, I sip them, with the bottle I am sharing with Grantaire; and grin with the knowledge that I could report them all; maybe, maybe I will, report every word, every one. 

The grin is because I am not going to. That would simply defeat the purpose. I close my eyes and soak everything up. Treason this. Revolution that. Holy September, mother of Fructidor. I open my eyes. 

Oh no. 

Maybe if I don't see him, he won't see me. The old white haired man just come in the room with the searching look and ironically benevolent stare. If I'd come upon him anywhere else, anywhere but here, his presence would be a nice juicy steak, served up with garlic. It would be luscious. 

He sits across the room and his eyes trip over me. Merde. He looks down and away. Damn him. 

This man is NOT a revolutionary. This man is not a traitor, inasmuch as his crimes, while equally weighty, are not of a seditious nature. What's more, he knows full well that I am not either. Yet he weaves in among the revolutionaries as if he is in his own damn bedroom. Like he is one of them.

He can't be.

He could at that.

No way in hell.

His lie reflects my lie and all of a sudden, I go cold. I can't relax. I can't hear the subtle beauty inherent in the prevalent discontent. It's all greek to me. lies of words. Blood and sweat. I grip my nightstick beneath my coat and close my eyes.

If I don't see him, maybe he'll go away. 

Listen to Grantiare. Sweet drunkard, fill me with your sensless babble. Beautiful dreamer, sleep unto me.

"Chronus' aching grandfather who first concieved clocks; great noisy indecency that was with all the nefarious ticking and such; let alone the criminal capacity to catalog these deciduous minutes we should let fall un-recorded; faith! To ignore time is to be a god; because the gods don't eat by the clock and they don't have anywhere in particular to be..."

NO, no, no!

"Shut up, winecask." I snarl at the startled drunkard and rise, hurrying from the room. The coal gaze of that convict, of Jean Valjean, it follows me blazing out into the night. I wish he himself would follow me; the ticking turned back on in my head like a timed powder keg wants to break something. If he follows me; it will certainly be him. 

But he doesn't, and I have to ring in. 

I wonder how much he knows. Enough? I wonder if he will tell them what I am. 

Tick tock. Damn drunk. I walk along the river, towards the police station.


	3. five minutes of perfection.

III. 

You wake up in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. 

You wake up in the Fauborg Saint Antoine.

How I met Martin Enjolras was like this. 

I didn't go back the next night to the Musain, nor did I go to the Voltaire, nor to Richfeus, nor any of the other places I secretly haunt in the guise of a workman. 

You wake up in the middle of the street. It is the same street, no matter what it is called. You wake up and you walk, at least-- you prowl, and they slink. 

I have no precinct. Paris is my oyster, and I am it's prying claw. 

There are a thousand alleys and streets and corridors in Paris, above and below the earth, a sort of great upper and lower intestine through which the decent, the innocent, and the moral enter, are chewed up in her massive jaws, pass along the great greenish-silver worm that is the Siene and are shat out again near Saint-Michel. The worst sort of filth crawl about underground, and one is content to allow them, as, at some point, as with one's bowels-- the offal will move. 

The Gentleman's lavratory is called La Force; the Ladies', Les Maladonettes. 

It was in my office as the porter of this lowest salon that I came upon Martin. There is a gate to the sewers along the Siene, near the Champs-Elysées. I woke up between this gate and the riverbank, perfectly still, watching and waiting, while all the good of Paris are asleep. My day of work does not end, for I only work at night. 

The position of the sun is irrelevant. It is Night in Paris. 

It is night and when I met Martin Enjolras the sun was threatening to rise over the river. From down there, below the bridges, sunken in, it looks like you are sitting under the horizon. It is a solitude in which you are not alone, for there are eyes beneath you and below you, and I am watching them all. That day there was no one at all, but Martin was in the river, swimming upstream through a current that ought to be able to carry off a horse. He cuts cleanly back and forth, beneath the shadow of the sun. There was no one else to watch, so I watched him. I was the only one watching this. He made each pass in exactly a minute, I counted. 

You wake up at the Pont au Change. 

Enjolras pulled himself out of the river without a glance at me until he had pulled on his shirt and trousers. Fastening his cuffs he looked at me, and behind his eyes was an answer for an accusation I haven't made yet. I barked at him, "What are you doing here?" 

"Watching. And waiting."

"What for?"

Martin looked at me, and came closer, memorising me like I was him, like I was a suspect, a criminal, a file. He looked like a young girl with a man's jaw and the eyes of a bird of prey. 

"What are _you_ doing here?" he asked.

I opened my mouth and shut it. 

"My job." I said finally. We were the only ones there. 

"Ah." He said, and asked me what time it was.

"Why?" I asked.

You wake up, and it is the middle of the night and the sun is shining directly in your eyes.

"It's four past six o clock."

"Because I am waiting for something." Said Martin.

"What on earth for?"

"Nothing on earth." He said, and looked up again. For a moment the sun turned the river gold and crimson, and then it was just crimson, a great pulsing vein of red, the lifeline of the city. I saw this for just a moment, and then it was just a river again, and then it was the same as it always seemed. Another hiding place for the rats and the scavengers.

"A trick of the light," murmured Martin, "and an opportunity is unhidden for a moment. Patience will let you see it, but you have to wait. A moment will come."

You wake up, and you can go to sleep again, or not.

His name was Martin Enjolras, and he was a law student at the University, and he said that he'd seen me at the café Musain, and he gave me his address.

"If you want to arrest me, Inspector, I can be found there." And he smiled, which was disconcerting, and he turned and walked back up towards the Champs-Elysées.

And that is how we met.


End file.
